


"Claudio Castagnoli Is a Ridiculous Human Being" -Miles Schneiderman

by NXTDNDIMHO



Series: NXTDNDIMHO [5]
Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game), WWE NXT - Fandom, World Wrestling Entertainment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-12
Updated: 2020-02-12
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:09:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22682248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NXTDNDIMHO/pseuds/NXTDNDIMHO
Summary: NXT Wrestling Fan is a podcast about falling in love with wrestling. It follows NXT starting 22 May 2013. It's a good show made by lovely people.In this episode, we learn exactly why NXT Wrestling Fan starts with the episode that first aired on 22 May 2013. Wrestling is better than the things to you like, and Claudio Castagnoli is better at it than the wrestlers you like. He has fired by singular obsession.This work came after Episode XIV: Have a Beer (with Kris Newton)
Series: NXTDNDIMHO [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1627138
Comments: 2





	"Claudio Castagnoli Is a Ridiculous Human Being" -Miles Schneiderman

In some episode of The Big Picture I don't have time to dig up, MovieBob was answering a question people who are trying to get into comics often ask: Where do I start? His advice was, "Start anywhere. Find something that interests you and start reading. If you come across something you don't understand and want to know more, look it up."

This is shockingly good advice for making an initial foray into something you think you'd like to be interested in. It doesn't matter where you start so much as that you start. Find something that interests you and go chase that rabbit. Elle Collins gave similar advice a few episodes of NXT WF back: There is a lot of pro-wrestling out there. Engage with the things that interest you and ignore everything else.

Fortunately for our purposes, however, we have been provided with a show to follow, and that show is driven by an auteur podcaster who drew focus first to a specific episode for a specific reason. That reason, the central arc the terminus of which is the point where you either get why professional wrestling is an artistic and valid storytelling medium or you don't and should probably just move on is the main event of this episode: Sami Zayn vs. Antonio Cesaro, Best 2 out of 3 Falls. It is a perfect encapsulation of what professional wrestling is trying to produce, masterfully constructed and executed, assembled out of pieces that are perhaps worn and ungleaming, but nevertheless has been assembled into a work that will remain undiminished by the progress of time. It is a masterwork of function. Likewise, the authorial vision Miles has displayed in choosing this as our archetypical base from which to build a love of this genera and medium ought rightfully be celebrated. There are no doubt other, flashier, stranger, more wrenching and gripping feuds and matches to be found, but you must walk before you can run, and the feud between Sami Zayn and Antonio Cesaro has a bedrock stride.

I have a board with a bunch of projects I want to eventually around to, a few notes attached to each. Cesaro is followed by one note: Technically Flawless. Everything that follows stems from me trying to justify that praise. But first, a discussion about Fighters.

So. Fighter. Kind of a silly name; unevocative, especially when placed between spicy meatballs like Druids and Monks. A Fighter is a person who fights, which, since D&D has its roots in tabletop tactics games, kind of describes just about everyone. The class doesn't really suggest much of a direction. This is, on varying levels, both a strength and a weakness for the class. The Fighter is an excellent class for beginning players because its focus is on having strong fundamentals. The Fighter is a boring class because, since those fundamentals are so strong, it doesn't incentivize doing anything besides engaging with the game on a fundamental level. Most of the experienced players I've talked to kind of shy away from playing Fighters because it's been done before, but they are extremely common because when you think of a kind of normal hero, you probably immediately think of someone who has the sort of powerset associated with the Fighter.

I always kind of looked down on the Fighter right up until a good friend told me that her crush identified as a Fighter and I was forced to scramble figuring out how to validate that as a choice that someone with a bunch of D&D experience could make. Being made to re-examine your preconceived notions is a gift.

I started by positioning The Fighter as the opposite number to The Wizard, probably the two most easily definable Classes. I placed them out on a continuum in order to show the separation between them, but the thing about defining two things as opposite ends of a spectrum in order to show their differences is that you are granting that the spectrum is the thing they have in common. I will spare you the whole process of me trying to define what that shared spectrum was and come to this: as dissimilar as the Wizard and Fighter might appear in all other respects, both classes are rooted in a fantasy of becoming heroically masterful. The Wizard uses their mastery of intellect and understanding of arcane arts in order to change the world. The Fighter uses their mastery of their physical body and understanding of martial arts (here used literally rather than idiomatically) to achieve the same ends. I understand how much this sounds like I'm describing a Monk, but that's another essay, as is a deeper dive into the ways that Fighters and Wizards compare and contrast. The important thing to remember here is that Claudio Castagnoli is a ridiculous human being who uses his muscles in a comparable way to how Merlin uses spells: with intention, precision, and devastating effect.

The most important work of rebuilding a good chunk of my philosophy in order to better reflect the world as it stands now down, the rest of this should proceed a bit more like the preceding entries in this series. That said, I think that, similar to how the Zayn/Cesaro feud was a good choice for establishing what a well-constructed Pro Wrestling plotline looks like, my build for Antonio Cesaro as a D&D 5e character makes for a good example of a what a D&D character that balances interesting specificities with well-worn but throughly effective generalities looks like. There are other, flashier, stranger, more wrenching and gripping characters to be created, but this sheet for Antonio Cesaro has a bedrock stride, and there is pleasure in walking even when you could run.

-Did I do a ⌘+F and type in "Athletic" in my D&D folder? No, but it feels that way.

-I chose Goliath for his race for a number of reasons. He is very tall and muscular and comes from a mountainous region, so he checks all the flavor boxes. Moreover, I think Cesaro lines up best with the mechanical Features of the Race I selected for him of anyone I've made thus far. +2 to Strength, +1 to Constitution, so he's naturally strong and hardy. Natural Athlete freed up space for other Proficiencies. Stone's Endurance basically allows him to negate an entire attack (yes, I'm thinking of that one in particular) and Powerful Build... I mean damn. His Wikipedia page makes special note of all the times he's picked up especially heavy wrestlers, people who weigh almost 100 lbs. more than him.

-A quick note about Ability Scores: Stats for D&D are loosely based on an average human having a 10 in every Ability, which yields a modifier of 0. Player Characters tend to be just broadly better at things than the average person, but it is also worth noting that a slightly lower score doesn't connote some sort of disability, but rather that it will not likely be a way that the character interacts with the world. Basically, me giving Cesaro an Intelligence score of 9 is not me calling him dumb. It is me communicating that I didn't find much evidence that the acquisition and recall of trivia doesn't seem like a way he would be particularly good at engaging with the world. That said, 20 is the absolute maximum an Ability Score can reach (with some exceptions), and if you have a score of 20 in anything, you are a legend for that thing.

-I chose the Entertainer background because it best communicated his training and career up to this point. There have been some bits of ephemera connecting his character to the military, but he has always been an athlete in the context of entertainment first. Also, he's been attached to a lot of different promotions, bouncing from place to place "By Popular Demand", as it were. 

-Some real eagle-eyed purists might see that there are somethings that I fudge on these sheets and some things I don't. I don't fudge Ability Scores or most other Features, and yet, in this instance, I converted the Disguise Kit proficiency he would have gotten into the ability to speak Elven, plus I'm counting Physical Acuity as an instrument and Mario Kart as a kind of Artisan Tool. I have personally found that it is best to be strict on Race and Class structures, but Backgrounds and Proficiencies are good places for expression and characterization. In terms of equipment... Honestly, that's just not a sort of complexity I have any interest in engaging with. Dungeon World and Blades in the Dark have vastly more elegant systems for mechanizing scarcity and load, but when it comes to D&D I've always been a fan of you have what it makes sense for you to have, and you can find what you need unless the search for or lack of something is particularly interesting. In these sheets, Equipment is more or less a dumping ground for allusions to references I dug out of their Wikipedia pages.

-I covered my broad thoughts about Cesaro as a Fighter above, and I think Features like Action Surge and Second Wind speak for themselves, along with the Fighter (and Wizard) advancement track being a bit more full of Ability Score Improvements to reflect the focus on self-improvement through mastering fundamentals. There are two key Fighter things I'd like to highlight, however:

+The Unarmed Fighting Style is found in the Unearthed Arcana article entitled Class Feature Variants, released 4 November 2019. It is a trove if you want to expand your options or think some Class Features from the base game need a bit of a tune up, but I think the most important work it does is change the way that Wizards of the Coast approach Fighting Styles. In the Players Handbook, the styles on offer were all bland-if-functional, but as they've released more of them, they've been getting more flavorful, even if the effectiveness can be a bit spotty. Unarmed Fighting in particular finally does what taking the Tavern Brawler feat never could and makes it actually feel effective to play a brawler that doesn't have to default to weapons or put levels into Monk.

+Battle Master is, to me, the most interesting of the three options for Martial Archetypes in the Players Handbook because it communicates exactly the sort of physical acuity and martial intelligence that I find operates as the mirror to the more simple Wizard spells. To that end, Maneuvers are interesting not because they allow the accomplish things that other players could not (because all of these things can be done with various checks), but that they allow the Battle Master to do these things within the normal progress of a battle, often as a part of their regular attacks. While anyone engaged in a melee can Grapple, Push, or Trip their opponent, they do so as an investment in another player's ability to cause damage to the enemy's Hit Points, which is ultimately what causes the end of a battle. Cesaro can make progress towards eliminating an opponent while simultaneously putting his teammates in a better position to do likewise, because he's a Fighter, which is to say that he's a fucking punch-wizard.


End file.
